Enhancement PvE Guide.

Welcome to the Cataclysm Enhancement Shaman Guide.

Updated for 4.3 10/1-2012

This is my first guide written so any imput and anything new i've not updated is welcomed.
With that said, i'm gonna be stealing like mad from Radux's Restoration Shaman Guide cause it looks nifty and it reduces the amount of stuff i have to do.
This will be strictly PvE as i am not big on PvP as Enhancement.

I'll try to only use as few abbreviations as possible, the ones being used being the most common ones, such as dps, aoe and the likes.

Talents

Since Cataclysm Enhancement Talents have not changed that significantly. Most of our talents are pretty straight forward and there's a pretty clear path down the Enhancement tree.

Enhancement Specialization

When you choose Enhancement as your Specilization you gain access to:Lava Lash Explained in the Spells section.Mental Quickness. Converts Attackpower into Spellpower. (4.3 stops you gaining spellpower from anything EXCEPT this ability)Dual Wield. Allows Dualwielding.Primal Wisdom Gives you mana when you hit stuff.Mastery I will explain further on our Mastery later.

Version 1Version 2
With the changes to Windshear the differences in the two specs are only "Do you have to interrupt or not"

Spells

General abilities

Feral Spirits
Your dps Cooldown. Time it well with your procs trinkets and bloodlust. Making a macro to use your Wolf Sprint is a good idea.

Unleash Elements
Gives several different effects depending on your current Weapon Imbues. Will detail a bit further down.

Stormstrike
One of your main offensive attacks. This attack also gives your offensive nature spells an additional chance to crit. Have the debuff up all the time.

Lava Lash
Your Top Hitter. This one will make your enemies quiver in fear. Searing Flames will boost this attack significantly and consume the dot in the progress making this attack hit very hard. Cooldown roughly fits with stacking up 5 Searing flames on your target.

Lightning Shield
When talented for it, will give a 45% to proc Lightning Shield when you use Lava Lash and Stormstrike. Refresh it before combat and then, if glyphed, forget about it.

Chain Lightning
Your go-to cleave ability. Only useful if you need to do cleave damage and should only be used with Maelstrom Weapon stacks.

Lightning Bolt
Your go-to ability to use with Maelstrom Weapon. Scales better than Chain Lightning so quickly becomes the better choice for single target dps.

Earth Shock
Deals nature damage and slows attackspeed of the target.
Use in place of Flameshock whenever you've got a Flameshock on the target and nothing better to use.

Flame Shock
Deals damage and applies a damage over time. Should be used when you have Unleash Flame buff to boost it a little extra.

Fire Nova
Emits a fire nova from all targets affected by Flameshock dealing damage to all targets nearby to everyone except the target affected by flameshock.

Lava Burst
Not used by Enhacement, except maybe during movement away from bosses with Spirit Walkers Grace.

Purge
Strips a target of a buff. Very useful in pvp, situational use on some raid encounters. Keep it bound on your hotkeys for the rare cases that you need it.

Wind Shear
Interrupts your target. As Enhancement you must have this hotkeyed to something you're comfortable with.
A good idea is to make a Focus Macro aswell.
If you are not familiar with focus macro's i will detail it further down.
(4.3 Cooldown increased to 15 seconds)

Ghost Wolf
Situational. Instant and usable indoors. Use it smart. You cannot be reduced by 100% movespeed while in ghostwolf.

Shamanistic Rage
Enhancement Shamans very own personal Defensive cooldown. Reduces Damage taken and makes your offensive spells cost no mana. Perfect for that big aoe incoming from a raid boss, or when you've just died and need to plant totems and cant hit anything to regain mana.

Hex
Shamans very own Crowd Control. Has a chance to break when damaged. Works wonders in 5mans and raid trash.

Bind Elemental
More CC for Shamans. Breaks when damaged. No Cooldown. Only works on. You guessed it! Elementals!

Spirit Walkers Grace
Allows you to cast spells while moving. Extremely Situational for Enhancement. Has its uses when moving away from a boss though.

Bloodlust.
We all know it, we all love it.
There's always alot of debate on when the best time to use it is and long story short, it depends largely on the fight.
As Enhacement it's important to consider timing of trinket procs, your Feral Spirits and Potion.

Weapon Imbues.

Windfury Weapon
Great Weapon imbue. Should always be on your Mainhand weapon. Has a internal cooldown of 3 seconds.Unleash Wind Deals damage and gives attackspeed boost.

Flametongue Weapon
In 4.3 Flametounge will now give you a flat 5% Spell damage increase + the on hit fire attack.
Should always be on your Offhand.Unleash Flame Deals damage and boosts your next Fire spell.

Rockbiter Weapon
Should only be used in very rare cases where you need to taunt something to save a healer with Unleash Elements or if you are - for some reason - tanking a 5man.Unleash Earth Taunts the target for 6 Seconds. To be used with consideration.

TotemsMagma Totem
Area of effect damage totem that ticks every second for some damage. Should only be used in situations where aoe is of utmost importance.

Searing Totem
Your standard Fire Totem. Should be down all the time if you are not aoe'ing. Will prefer to attack targets affected by Flame Shock and Storm Strike.

Earthbind Totem
Situational Totem that slows in a area effect every few seconds.

Flametongue Totem
Should only be used in the extremely rare cases where no Mage, Demonology Warlock or any other Shaman is present. The loss of Searing Totem will significantly reduce your damage.

Windfury Totem
Your Standard go-to Air Totem. Always doublecheck what air totems other Shamans are using to ensure that Both Castspeed and Attackspeed totems are present.
Generally goes without saying the Enhance Shaman uses Windfury Totem.

Stoneclaw Totem
Pvp totem. Has its uses with a Glyph that puts a shield on you when you use the totem.

Grounding Totem Redirects the next targetted hostile spell cast on you or anyone in your group to the totem.
Cooldown changed to 25 seconds up from 15 seconds in 4.1

Priority Queue.
Enhancement Shamans are largely very straightforward.
We don't have a set-in-stone rotation but a priority queue.
So basicly, the higher a spell is in the priority the more you want to use it, if it's not on cooldown.

This will simply chainlightning your focus and if there's no focus chainlightning your target. Useful for 1 fight only, but it doesnt hurt to have it added in there and it doesnt affect you at all on other fights.

Macro for Spirit Wolves & Spirit Wolves Sprint in 1 button.

#showtooltip
/cast [nopet] Feral Spirit; [pet] Spirit Walk

Always refresh your weapon imbues and Lightning Shield before entering any boss fights. Having Lightning Shield or your Weapon Imbues drop off midfight can be devastating to your dps.
Keep a few heals bound for situations where stop-dps is called and you have the mana to spare.

Enhance generally dont need to respec or reglyph depending on fights, but after 4.1 we'll have the option to use Flameshock Glyph to increase the duration on Flameshock by 50%.
This will be very useful for aoe situations because of the new way Fire Nova will be working. Keep some spare Dust of Disappearance in your bags, for these cases.

Have your situational abilitues bound. Spirit Walkers grace will not be useful if you need to stop up and find it in your spellbook.
Enhance has a ton of abilities that are situational. Spend some time and consider which you might have to use and bind them with consideration.

You can remove curses as Enhance Shaman, be helpful to your dispellers if healing is tight and dps is a non issue.

If in doubt. Just ask the question and people are usually very helpful on this board.

Glyphs

If you're familiar with the Enhance Glyphs, you probably already know that we have a few choices and most of them are good choices.

Glyph of Grounding Totem Most spells in raids are not ment to be grounded and usually get fixed, so largely a pvp Glyph.

Most the Majors are by preference only, since they are largely just situational utility. My personal favorites are Lightning Shield, Healing Stream Totem and Ghostwolf.

Stats
Listed in order of importance.

Agility
Agility is our main Stat. The best stat you can get.
Every 1 Agility is also worth 1 Spellpower through Mental Quickness

Hit
Hit is what you want to cap as fast as you can. Reforge for it untill you're at the spellcap. This is 1742. 1639 for Draenei.
As of 4.1 you do not need hit to interrupt with Windshear, but this is still a very valuable stat for dps.
After Spellhit Cap, hit drops below Haste in terms of value, but still gives a dps increase.

Expertise
Get to cap as fast as possible. Without any racials the rating required is 542. Obviously this is for dodge only as you should (almost) always be behind a boss.

Mastery Enhanced Elements
Enhancement Shamans have a very straight forward Mastery. It's the next best thing after Agility, when you capped your Hit and Expertise.

Crit
Slightly better than haste.

Haste
Enhancement does not gain any energy gain or reduced cooldown on a ability and with Windfury on a internal cooldown haste is not near as great as it used to be.

Intelligence.
Gives spellpower and some spellcrit. Dont gear or gem for this in any cases.

Strength
While some items may seem like a upgrade they most likely are not if they have str. 1ap per 1 str, makes Agility over twice as good. Str is the enemy!

When you're gemming a new pieces of gear, it's often a good idea to take a good look at what gems you have in your gear overall, making sure your meta gem requirement is met and considering if you can meet hit rating requirements with reforging instead of gemming and such.

Weapon EnchantsLandslide on both weapons. If you're still in greens and blues and just dinged 85 go with Avalanche as it works nicely with our Mastery.

Gear Builds

Pre-Raiding gear

I'll list the different choices for each slot in order of how good they are for you.
Important. When you're gearing for either of the "sets" keep in mind, if you're halfway through a gearset, the items you've aquired may not be the "best" for you at that point in time. Always make sure you've got your hit rating and expertise ratings sorted when you get new gear. Sometimes you'll have to wait a while before equipping a Epic piece simply because it doesnt have hit or expertise.

This is not yet 100% certain i will try and verify all this by weeks end.
Some Tier 12 Heroic Items are bis even at this point and will be included although i will add their alternative if you realy dont do any heroic bosses

Shock and Awe.
Great addon for getting the priority queue right, checking uptime on several buffs and much much more. Highly recommended if you are new to Enhance.

Enhsim.
Long story short, this program will simulate combat with the stats you feed it and then figure out if a item would be a upgrade or not, along with many many many other things. If you've got half a mind to realy mastering this spec, you wanna take a closer look at this.

Rawr.
Another program that will help you making sure you're chosing the right gems, the right gear enchant and so forth for your specific setup.

**Please reply to the thread if you find any errors, or anything you'd like me to put in here addtionally, be it more addons, updates i've forgotte, or simply just silly typo's.

For me Stat value wise 20 mastery socket bonus was never worth losing a 40 agility over, could you elaborate and proof it how you find it to add more DPS then just gemming agility?

I'm not 100% on the Enhancement stat weights, but I know Mastery is one of your better stats. It's likely it's worth more than half as much as Agility, point-for-point. That means that 40 Mastery and 20 Agility (20 Agi/20 Mastery gem + 20 mastery socket) is more DPS than 40 Agility.

Best bet is to run Enhsim or something similar to get some reliable stat weights, and then work it out for yourself.

And thanks go to you, Tides, for stepping up and taking this project on.

I ask if i look at my stat values i get the following Agility 2.36, Mastery 0,86. and generally mastery for me always seems to be a bit less then half then agility. (this is unbuffed buffed i get 2,48 and 1,04)

If mastery was just half the value of agility, in a 2 to 1 ratio then we would get the same outcome. Even gemming like you say that being;
A 20 socket bonus comes from a 2 gem piece, so to compare:
2x agility gems = 160.
1 agility gem + 1 agility/mastery + mastery socket bonus = 160.

So far, what i've read myself and from my own experiences when simming after getting new items, i've been told to gem like this.
I'm looking over my gear now and i'm acually seeing i'm not even doing what i'm telling you to do, so i think i'll just go sim this again and update it accordingly. When i sober up that is.

Regarding updating in the future, i'll try and update it before a content patch hits, since i'll be busy raiding 12 hours a day for the first week or so after content comes out. Either expect updates before content patches, or a week or 2 after.

So if Agility's value is 2.86 EP and there was 200 on an item, it would contribute 572 dps. Add in the other secondary stats and you'll find out how much dps that particular item will be. So there are definitely cases where a hybrid gem with a +Mastery socket bonus may pay off rather than socketing a pure Agility gem.

I haven't done any math on any particular items, but the theory/math is sound.

As far as I know, you'll only benefit from mastery by half a point, like 16.5-17-17.5 etc. By swapping gem around, depending on the socket or not, you can hit the mark quite nicely. For example even if 40 agi yields more dps than 20 agi 40 mastery, if it can bring your mastery to half a point, then it's worth gemming for it and vice versa.

At my gear level (around ilvl 350 and 346 weapons), Enhsim puts mastery around .9 with agility at 2.3. I however still use agi/mastery gems all over the place since I feel mastery is better in certain AoE situations.

Also, if you are using Shock and Awe, which I highly recommend, you can add more priorities into the rotation. For example, the one that does the maximum damage for me at my gear is below. It is the standard rotation but reminds me to use more lightning bolts as they produce more dps for ME.

Version 1Version 2
Both specs are very similar. The points in Reverberation and Elemental Precision are mostly optional, with the option for putting them into Call of Flame or Elemental Warding depending on the need for aoe or more survivability.

kinda inaccurate, call of flames > reverberation for single target as well as aoe. it's better than concussion or imp. shields as well. same for elemental precision.

Mastery does not need a whole or half a point to be useful, each amount of added mastery to contributes to extra elemental damage.

Trying to gear for AoE is like a healer trying to gear for DPS, there's no real gain in it. As for your choices in gems and gear, i suggest reading the guide written

SAA is a learning tool, it doesn't factor in globals making you use lesser abilities delaying the use of other abilities. Where you otherwise would've waited less then half a second to use LL or UE_FS. The idea of using MW_LB before 5 stacks is that you would otherwise have lost stacks by using it only at 5 all the time and it's only beneficial when everything else is on CD, could very well be it comes ahead of ES.
To clarify not saying using SAA is bad, i used it to learn the spec. You are however beter off eventually to do that thinking for yourself.

kinda inaccurate, call of flames > reverberation for single target as well as aoe. it's better than concussion or imp. shields as well. same for elemental precision.

Imp shields is realy a filler talent that you kinda need to get down in the tree so ya gotta take at least 2 points in that. I can't say i know for sure about call of Flame vs Reverberation, i simply go with that because it gives more room for error with interruptions. Especially on fights like Cho'gall Heroic, you realy want Reverb for the adds.
Interruption is a Enhance Shamans bread and butter, may as well be as good as we can be at it.

Originally Posted by koimagheul

feral spirit is the least powerful of the lot, should be mentionned.

I think you might be onto something there.
Will sim that and change it accordingly

Interruption is a Enhance Shamans bread and butter, may as well be as good as we can be at it.

there's a slight difference between being as good as we can and being as good as we need to be at interrupting.
we don't need reverb for maloriak, nefarian and halfus. the only moment it can be of actual help is cho'gall and omnotron 10man heroic (or so i've heard, i don't 10m).

10 years ago we had Steve Jobs, Bob Hope and Johnny Cash. Now we have no Jobs, no Hope and no Cash.

Shock and Awe is mentioned all the time in all the enhance threads i have read, but I have found Enhaprio works better for me personally, might be better for others too :-)

I also find ShieldsUp very helpful for both enhance and resto, as well as using PowerAuras to make my own indicators for other things SAA does, which I like better because its custom and i can fit it to my style. Example, I have the little mario fire flower icon used for my searing stacks, displaying a small number above it for stacks on the target, granted its only displayed on the target i have in my sights (if its present) but that allows me to reset the totem or look for the right target if needed.

Quick question about the rotation: Do you find letting FS dots falls off or clipping it yields more dps? Sometimes when there's 5s FS or so, mw5_lb come up--->LB, then UE, then for some reason got another LB, then LL off cd. By the time I use all those skills FS dots already falls off. Another thing is that how much time left on FS dots is "acceptable" for clipping? There're some occasions where I refresh FS when there's 6 or 7s left =/

About SAA, I still use it, but mainly for mw5_lb (for some reason I dont like the one Blizz provides). I recommend power aura for that, just set cd timer on your skills and place them on the middle of the screen. What happens is sometimes (well, many times) 2-3 or even 4 skills are off cd at the same time. Using power aura will give you an idea what button to press next well ahead of time, and dont have to delay half a second for each skill anymore.

Using power aura will give you an idea what button to press next well ahead of time, and dont have to delay half a second for each skill anymore.

Thats what i love about Enhaprio, it shows a listing of the next 3 skills and updates very very quickly for stuff that either proc'd (MWx5), needs refreshing, or came off cooldown. Also shows the gcd on the icons.

Just got full epic gear yesterday and wondering if im doing everything correctly. Went to a random HC gruop where was a full epic frost dk and he was pulling 20k on trash while i was at 14k-15k, is it just because our aoe sucks??? Cant post my armory link here but char name Ðaða server Vashj.

at a quick glimse the thing that stands out most to me, is that you chose a Mastery cogwheel instead of a Expertise cogwheel and you're reforging out of expertise and into expertise.

Try removing all your reforging to see where you stand and then start with reforging from scratch, starting with Haste -> hit/expertise and working your way like that. That's how i usually do it when i feel that i can get a bit extra out of the gear with a new item i've gotten.